Kunal Mankodiya

WEARABLE BIOSENSING LAB conducts
interdisciplinary research between biomedical sensors and wearable
embedded systems. The overarching goal of the lab is to simplify
the design of point-of-care medical devices to a point where
individuals are enveloped by unobtrusive health sensing elements
for tele-monitoring disease symptoms and for remote healthcare
management.

ONGOING PROJECTS

NSF CAREER: CPS: Internet of Wearable E-Textiles for Telemedicine

This CAREER project aims to translate the smart electronic
textile (e-textile) technologies to fill the need for
telemedicine. The project will result into an in-home, wearable
internet-of-things hub (referred to as "IoT-Hub") consisting of
smart e-textiles such as e-gloves, e-socks, and companion
computing devices for data analytics, storage, and communications
to the cloud servers of hospitals.

NIH: anEAR : Android Electrically Activated Recorder

This is a collaborative project with Rhode Island Hospital to
understand THE INTERPLAY OF SOCIAL CONTEXT AND PHYSIOLOGY ON
PSYCHOLOGICAL OUTCOMES IN TRAUMA-EXPOSED ADOLESCENTS. We implement
and deploy wearable systems to monitor the physiological and
personal environment indicators in participants with PTSD.

NSF CRII: Brain-Body Sensor Fusion

The functional coupling between the activities of brain and
muscle can be measured as cortico-muscular coherence (CMC). This
project is aimed at integrating fNIRS neuroimaging with body's
motion dynamics to study individuals with movement disorders.

PAST RESEARCH

SPARK: Smartphone/Smartwatch System for Parkinson Patients

Parkinson disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative
disorder afflicting more than 1 million aging Americans,
incurring $23 billion in annual medical costs in the U.S. alone.
Efficient management of PD requires complex medication regimens
specifically titrated to individuals’ needs. These personalized
regimens are difficult to maintain for the patient and difficult
to prescribe for a physician in the few minutes available during
office visits. Diverging from current form of laboratory-ridden
technologies, SPARK framework is built upon a synergistic
combination of Smartphone and Smartwatch in monitoring
multidimensional symptoms – such as facial tremors,
dysfunctional speech, limb dyskinesia, and gait abnormalities.

Pulse-Glasses: A Cloud-Connected Eyewear for Health Monitoring

Pulse-Glasses technology is a pair of smartglasses to monitor
human health unobtrusively and continuously. It uses wearable IoT
framework to manage sensors, computations and communications.

Ubiquitous Intelligence in Behavioral Interventions

Behavioral
disorders demand more efficient technology to analyze patients'
emotional health as well as their compliance with prescribed
therapy. Mobile Health (mHealth) is one of the active research
areas and offers a remarkable opportunity in the field of
psychiatry to evaluate patient’s emotional health. Smartphones,
today, come with multiple sensors and could help to understand
specific signatures of mental illness, if ubiquitous intelligence
and computing would be injected in smartphones. This project aims
at sensing emotions, mental states, and behaviors of patients with
mental disorders.

Multimodal Wearable Health Monitoring [Completed in 2010]

Along with Worldwide population growth, there has been increment
in the number of individuals with chronic diseases such as
diabetes, cardiovascular disorders, sleeping disorder, vestibular
disorder, and many others. We focused on the need of multi-sensory
wearable health monitoring as well as presented a design of such a
monitor using energy-efficient, high-performance embedded
processors. We designed miniaturized wearable health sensors that
synced the medical data to such processors for real-time signal
processing. This research was highly interdisciplinary in nature
and applicable to the emerging fields of technology such as Mobile
Health (mHealth), Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), Pervasive Health,
Ubiquitous/Wearable Computing and Embedded Computing.

ActiveBelt: Textile-based Wearable ECG System [Completed in 2010]

Life-threatening cardiovascular diseases
require early detection or diagnosis. A standard procedure,
long-term ECG monitoring of cardiac patients is currently the
best way to reduce the number of heart failures. Dry and
washable textile electrodes embedded in comfortable garment or
in a wearable chest belt have been proven very effective for a
long-term ECG monitoring in comparison to the conventional
Ag/AgCl electrodes. ActiveBelt was a wearable ECG chest belt,
which contained stitched textile electrodes for ECG detection
and analog preprocessing circuits embedded in tiny cell-phone
plugs. We have achieved promising results of textile electrodes
along with our hardware and embedded system in conveying a
better ECG signal quality having a clinical significance for a
long-term ECG recording in a daily life.

Miniaturized Cerebral Oximetry [Completed in 2011]

Cerebral injury due to hypoxia is one of the
most dreadful outcomes of surgical procedures. NIRS based
cerebral oximetry is known to be a noninvasive and safe method
to monitor cerebral metabolism and oxygen consumption. In
cerebral oximetry, A sensor patch on the forehead injects
near-infrared light through the different layers of the skull
and detects the backscattered light intensities. We developed a
novel design of a miniaturized cerebral oximeter, which
consisted of small-scale analog frontend linking to a
high-performance embedded system for onboard data processing.
The heart of the system was an OMAP3530 dual core processor,
which produced the driving pulses for the light source and
acquired the detected data as a function of the wavelengths to
calculate and display rSO2 (brain oxygen) value.

PREVIOUS RESEARCH IN EMBEDDED COMPUTING

Conceptually, immersive environments virtually surround
individuals such that they psychologically feel themselves to be
covered by an environment providing continuous visual stimuli, and
feel their presence at the remote environment. Today, the 3D
visualization and exploration of real-world spaces on the computer
screen is very much a product of panorama photography and its
applications in the field of computing and human-computer
interaction (HCI). This project was a design, implementation, and
deployment of the cloud-assisted interface framework for
immersive environment that can be ported to personal computing
devices as well as larger networked displays, such as retail
kiosks and television

PANOPTES: Crowd-sourced Cars

The project built upon the successful and highly visible
deployed mobile 311 efforts (with iBurgh being the nation’s first
mobile 311 app) and the crowdsourced snow-removal HowsMyStreet
platform. By employing cloud-based crowdsourcing of the automated
reports from the various embedded platforms in all of the vehicles
under test, and then correlating this data potentially with the
crowdsourced information from human input, this project was aimed
at providing a more accurate, actionable picture of the
driveability of the roads under snow-storm and pothole-ridden
conditions.

MetaBot: Schedulable Behaviors in Mobile Robots

Mobile service robots are mission-oriented machines, built to
perform actions associated with desired goals. Accordingly, the
mobile robot requires knowledge of how to coordinate several
actions relative to environmental and timing constraints. MetaBot,
a sensor-rich mobile robot, was designed to autonomously navigate
indoor environments and execute micro-navigational tasks,
commanded by human operators or scheduled at predefined
time-intervals.